A frequent criticism of YHA in recent years, on these pages and elsewhere, is their failure to communicate with the membership. The blog and forum added to the website just over a year ago were a step in the right direction, but many members continue to miss the paper publications of years gone by.
How welcome, then, to find on my doormat a new incarnation of an old friend. The new YHA News is a twelve-page colour newsletter combining news from the network and features about hostelling at home and abroad. It’s still a piece of marketing of course, but it feels more like a magazine and less like a sales brochure than Discover ever did.
Of particular interest to readers of this site is a letter from Margaret Bray, now living in New Zealand, remembering her days in an (unnamed) YHA Local Group just after the war:
For Ken and me, with no secure home life, our local Youth Hostels association groups which sprang up after the war became family, and for many other teenagers feeling similarly displaced. Several members, like us, came from broken homes, a few were young men demobbed from the armed forces, most of us probably feeling a bit lost after six fractured years of war. We met socially every Thursday night in a nearby hall. Spare cash was non-existent, but Youth Hostels were cheap We democratically organized ourselves with a committee and a constitution. We organized our own programmes.
Thriving from the friendship, we hostelled by either biking or walking as a group almost every weekend and summer holiday, leaving bombed out London behind to explore the English countryside. We’d wander down to the village pub in the evening, making a glass of sweet-and-sour cider, or a glass of beer last all the evening before going back to our dormitories. We even spent our Christmasses together at a hostel despite them closing between ten and five. We went for walks round the villages to fill in those winter hours outdoors and made our own simple fun in the evenings with games, ghost stories, or playing cards. On Christmas Eve we went to the poorly attended midnight service in those old village churches, often doubling the congregation, to the vicar’s delight.
We looked out for each other, affirmed each other, knew the good and bad sides of us all. More like brothers and sisters really. After all not much glamour remains after hours of cycling, walking or climbing in pouring rain, or coping with punctures, tiredness, grumpiness, sunburn or getting lost. My father always thought, wrongly, that we were “up-to-no-good” but romance did of course eventually blossom, and thirteen couples married in our early twenties, almost all proving successful and rewarding.
An experience not entirely unrecognisable to YHA group members today, I think. It’s just a shame that they fail to point out that hostelling groups aren’t some vanished artefact of the 1940s and 50s, but alive and well and meeting in a town near you! Oh well, maybe next issue.
An accompanying questionnaire invites feedback on YHA’s communcations, and what you’d like to read about in the future. All-in-all, I think this marks a very promising development in YHA’s relationship with its members.
The YHA is justly proud of its 
It’s now over seven years since the doors closed at Norwich YH. Since then, though the YHA have never ruled out a return to the historic East Anglian city, there’s been nowhere for hostellers to stay if they wish to visit.